Commissioned by the BBC. First performed by Jane Manning, Barry Guy, John Baddeley and John Rye with London Sinfonietta, conductor Elgar Howarth, Liverpool, 1973.

[Full programme note here]

"The score was composed during the Michaelmas term, 1972, in my room at the top of the Music School at Durham. (Far from interrupting me, I think my colleagues and composition students protected me - most of my students would be equally absorbed in their own work in the Lighthouse of the Library which adjoined my room, too busy to require any 'teaching'.) As with most of the works of that period, I heard the music of Aria through the music of the Cathedral Bells, directly opposite my windows. Composing walks were down to the river, round the peninsula, returning through the Close and - in the hours it was open - through the Cathedral itself. I loved that building and never ceased to discover a thrill in its sounds and lights and spaces. And during the composing of Aria there was often another excitement which became palpable within its walls: the presence of that landscape of the mind, its images and creatures, so familiar to me, so strange and foreign to the makers of this most beautiful building and to its present inhabitants. In love, I never felt so close to the European tradition: in my roots 1 was discovering just how far I was outside it."